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Making the Most of Your Time with Your Senior Pastor

In many churches, time constraints can leave the staff continuously pulled in different directions. To relate best to our church leadership, we must learn how to make the best of the time that we share together, especially when it comes to time with your senior pastor. The senior pastor relationship can be one of the most encouraging relationships that a staff person can have and there are some ways to make the most out of the senior pastor and staff relationship.

Always Pray Together

Whenever you get together with your senior pastor, commit to praying for one another, for your families, and for the ministries you are involved in. Opening your meetings in prayer can change the trajectory of your thoughts during the meeting and remind you of the kingdom purposes that God has in store for your ministry together. Praying together will remind you to center all of your thoughts and visions on God’s will rather than your own thinking. This simple step will help you to make the most of your time by inviting God to move through your meetings together and creating sacred space for your time together.

Commit to Meet Regularly

When our ministries are going well or we are feeling short on time, we often choose to forego the appointments that seem less important than others. I encourage you to set up a recurring meeting with your senior pastor and stick to that regular meeting. This will allow you to keep an open line of communication between yourself and the senior pastor where you can share the positives and negatives of your current ministry. This is a time when you can encourage one another and share simple details like prayer requests from your students or from your own personal life. This meeting will allow you and the senior pastor to be on the same page when it comes to your ministry and will allow you the time to work together in ministry. This way, your senior pastor will be informed about what is happening in your life and your ministry and you will have an open line of communication already forged if an issue arises.

Share Your Overall Vision For Ministry

If you have been in youth ministry long, you probably have a vision for where you feel like God is leading your youth ministry. Is God nudging you to go into the local schools, or start fundraising for a mission trip, or leading you to ask the church for help with camp scholarships? Share with your senior pastor the visions that God has laid on your heart for the youth ministry. You might be surprised that your senior pastor has been feeling led to cast some of the same vision for the church. The Bible encourages unity in relationships, and casting the same vision can be one of the ways to model this strong stance of unity with your senior pastor.